Echo: An Interview with a Locative Media Startup

Yesterday on MediaShift, Mark Glaser posted a great interview with Karyn Lu and Lila King who just won $10,000 in seed money from the New Media Women Entrepreneurs Competition. Lu and King, both working for CNN in Atlanta, pitched a project called Echo that will collect stories from citizens of Atlanta through physical hot spots in the city.

The plan is to post signs with phone numbers and location IDs for that geographical location. They are starting hyper-local by gathering interviews from  a single neighborhood in Atlanta called Lake Claire. In those interviews, they are asking locals about spots important to them. On their project page, they say these will be part of their proof of concept.

To better inform their design, Lu and King mention dinner with experts from areas outside of journalism as a part of their planning process:

Part of our development process is setting up brainstorming dinners among our friends who have different backgrounds and expertise. And every time we talk to someone new, they have a new light to shed on how we might direct the project and what we might do specifically. We’re all ears.

Also in the interview, King and Lu talk about picking up a few web-skills (HTML, CSS, etc.) and running with them. While the less techie journalists out there are sometimes intimidated by learning code, King has a nice take on the possibilities of the web vs. other media:

King: I don’t consider myself to be a supreme software developer, but there’s enormous ease and possibility on the web. You can learn a little bit and do so much with it. That’s so enticing. Over the years, we’ve often talked about what else we might do. It’s so easy to go from having an idea to making it happen on the web, that doesn’t necessarily map to other media.

The rest of the interview is a great snapshot into a new team's planning process and includes thoughts on business models, how they'll use the $10,000, and reactions from their peers in traditional media.